Process extraction, a recently emerged interdiscipline, aims to extract procedural knowledge expressed in texts. Previous process extractors heavily depend on domain-specific linguistic knowledge, thus suffer from the problems of poor quality and lack of adaptability. In this paper, we propose a multi-task architecture based model to perform process extraction. This is the first attempt that brings deep learning in process extraction. Specifically, we divide process extraction into three complete and independent subtasks: sentence classification, sentence semantic recognition and semantic role labeling. All of these subtasks are trained jointly, using a weight-sharing multi-task learning (MTL) framework. Moreover, instead of using fixed-size filters, we use multiscale convolutions to perceive more local contextual features. Finally, we propose a recurrent construction algorithm to create a graphical representation from the extracted procedural knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can extract more accurate procedural information than state-of-the-art baselines.

We propose an efficient linear-time graph-based divisive cluster analysis approach called Sampling Clustering. It constructs a lite informative dendrogram by recursively dividing a graph into subgraphs. In each recursive call, a graph is sampled first with a set of vertices being removed to disconnect latent clusters, then condensed by adding edges to the remaining vertices to avoid graph fragmentation caused by vertex removals. We also present some sampling and condensing methods and discuss the effectiveness in this paper. Our implementations run in linear time and achieve outstanding performance on various types of datasets. Experimental results show that they outperform state-of-the-art clustering algorithms with significantly less computing resource requirements.

Graph embedding learns low-dimensional representations for nodes in a graph and effectively preserves the graph structure. Recently, a significant amount of progress has been made toward this emerging research area. However, there are several fundamental problems that remain open. First, existing methods fail to preserve the out-degree distributions on directed graphs. Second, many existing methods employ random walk based proximities and thus suffer from conflicting optimization goals on undirected graphs. Finally, existing factorization methods are unable to achieve scalability and non-linearity simultaneously. This paper presents an in-depth study on graph embedding techniques on both directed and undirected graphs. We analyze the fundamental reasons that lead to the distortion of out-degree distributions and to the conflicting optimization goals. We propose {\em transpose proximity}, a unified approach that solves both problems. Based on the concept of transpose proximity, we design \strap, a factorization based graph embedding algorithm that achieves scalability and non-linearity simultaneously. \strap makes use of the {\em backward push} algorithm to efficiently compute the sparse {\em Personalized PageRank (PPR)} as its transpose proximities. By imposing the sparsity constraint, we are able to apply non-linear operations to the proximity matrix and perform efficient matrix factorization to derive the embedding vectors. Finally, we present an extensive experimental study that evaluates the effectiveness of various graph embedding algorithms, and we show that \strap outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of effectiveness and scalability.

This work begins by establishing a mathematical formalization between different geometrical interpretations of Neural Networks, providing a first contribution. From this starting point, a new interpretation is explored, using the idea of implicit vector fields moving data as particles in a flow. A new architecture, Vector Fields Neural Networks(VFNN), is proposed based on this interpretation, with the vector field becoming explicit. A specific implementation of the VFNN using Euler's method to solve ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and gaussian vector fields is tested. The first experiments present visual results remarking the important features of the new architecture and providing another contribution with the geometrically interpretable regularization of model parameters. Then, the new architecture is evaluated for different hyperparameters and inputs, with the objective of evaluating the influence on model performance, computational time, and complexity. The VFNN model is compared against the known basic models Naive Bayes, Feed Forward Neural Networks, and Support Vector Machines(SVM), showing comparable, or better, results for different datasets. Finally, the conclusion provides many new questions and ideas for improvement of the model that can be used to increase model performance.

Machine Learning techniques have become pervasive across a range of different applications, and are now widely used in areas as disparate as recidivism prediction, consumer credit-risk analysis and insurance pricing. The prevalence of machine learning techniques has raised concerns about the potential for learned algorithms to become biased against certain groups. Many definitions have been proposed in the literature, but the fundamental task of reasoning about probabilistic events is a challenging one, owing to the intractability of inference. The focus of this paper is taking steps towards the application of tractable models to fairness. Tractable probabilistic models have emerged that guarantee that conditional marginal can be computed in time linear in the size of the model. In particular, we show that sum product networks (SPNs) enable an effective technique for determining the statistical relationships between protected attributes and other training variables. If a subset of these training variables are found by the SPN to be independent of the training attribute then they can be considered `safe' variables, from which we can train a classification model without concern that the resulting classifier will result in disparate outcomes for different demographic groups. Our initial experiments on the `German Credit' data set indicate that this processing technique significantly reduces disparate treatment of male and female credit applicants, with a small reduction in classification accuracy compared to state of the art. We will also motivate the concept of "fairness through percentile equivalence", a new definition predicated on the notion that individuals at the same percentile of their respective distributions should be treated equivalently, and this prevents unfair penalisation of those individuals who lie at the extremities of their respective distributions.

Deep Gaussian processes (DGP) have appealing Bayesian properties, can handle variable-sized data, and learn deep features. Their limitation is that they do not scale well with the size of the data. Existing approaches address this using a deep random feature (DRF) expansion model, which makes inference tractable by approximating DGPs. However, DRF is not suitable for variable-sized input data such as trees, graphs, and sequences. We introduce the GP-DRF, a novel Bayesian model with an input layer of GPs, followed by DRF layers. The key advantage is that the combination of GP and DRF leads to a tractable model that can both handle a variable-sized input as well as learn deep long-range dependency structures of the data. We provide a novel efficient method to simultaneously infer the posterior of GP's latent vectors and infer the posterior of DRF's internal weights and random frequencies. Our experiments show that GP-DRF outperforms the standard GP model and DRF model across many datasets. Furthermore, they demonstrate that GP-DRF enables improved uncertainty quantification compared to GP and DRF alone, with respect to a Bhattacharyya distance assessment. Source code is available at https://github.com/IssamLaradji/GP_DRF.

High-dimensional Nearest Neighbor (NN) search is central in multimedia search systems. Product Quantization (PQ) is a widespread NN search technique which has a high performance and good scalability. PQ compresses high-dimensional vectors into compact codes thanks to a combination of quantizers. Large databases can, therefore, be stored entirely in RAM, enabling fast responses to NN queries. In almost all cases, PQ uses 8-bit quantizers as they offer low response times. In this paper, we advocate the use of 16-bit quantizers. Compared to 8-bit quantizers, 16-bit quantizers boost accuracy but they increase response time by a factor of 3 to 10. We propose a novel approach that allows 16-bit quantizers to offer the same response time as 8-bit quantizers, while still providing a boost of accuracy. Our approach builds on two key ideas: (i) the construction of derived codebooks that allow a fast and approximate distance evaluation, and (ii) a two-pass NN search procedure which builds a candidate set using the derived codebooks, and then refines it using 16-bit quantizers. On 1 billion SIFT vectors, with an inverted index, our approach offers a Recall@100 of 0.85 in 5.2 ms. By contrast, 16-bit quantizers alone offer a Recall@100 of 0.85 in 39 ms, and 8-bit quantizers a Recall@100 of 0.82 in 3.8 ms.

The concept of Industry 4.0 brings a disruption into the processing industry. It is characterised by a high degree of intercommunication, embedded computation, resulting in a decentralised and distributed handling of data. Additionally, cloud-storage and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) approaches enhance a centralised storage and handling of data. This often takes place in third-party networks. Furthermore, Industry 4.0 is driven by novel business cases. Lot sizes of one, customer individual production, observation of process state and progress in real-time and remote maintenance, just to name a few. All of these new business cases make use of the novel technologies. However, cyber security has not been an issue in industry. Industrial networks have been considered physically separated from public networks. Additionally, the high level of uniqueness of any industrial network was said to prevent attackers from exploiting flaws. Those assumptions are inherently broken by the concept of Industry 4.0. As a result, an abundance of attack vectors is created. In the past, attackers have used those attack vectors in spectacular fashions. Especially Small and Mediumsized Enterprises (SMEs) in Germany struggle to adapt to these challenges. Reasons are the cost required for technical solutions and security professionals. In order to enable SMEs to cope with the growing threat in the cyberspace, the research project IUNO Insec aims at providing and improving security solutions that can be used without specialised security knowledge. The project IUNO Insec is briefly introduced in this work. Furthermore, contributions in the field of intrusion detection, especially machine learning-based solutions, for industrial environments provided by the authors are presented and set into context.

Exploration is a crucial component for discovering approximately optimal policies in most high-dimensional reinforcement learning (RL) settings with sparse rewards. Approaches such as neural density models and continuous exploration (e.g., Go-Explore) have been instrumental in recent advances. Soft actor-critic (SAC) is a method for improving exploration that aims to combine off-policy updates while maximizing the policy entropy. We extend SAC to a richer class of probability distributions through normalizing flows, which we show improves performance in exploration, sample complexity, and convergence. Finally, we show that not only the normalizing flow policy outperforms SAC on MuJoCo domains, it is also significantly lighter, using as low as 5.6% of the original network's parameters for similar performance.

We consider the problem of recovering a common latent source with independent components from multiple views. This applies to settings in which a variable is measured with multiple experimental modalities, and where the goal is to synthesize the disparate measurements into a single unified representation. We consider the case that the observed views are a nonlinear mixing of component-wise corruptions of the sources. When the views are considered separately, this reduces to nonlinear Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for which it is provably impossible to undo the mixing. We present novel identifiability proofs that this is possible when the multiple views are considered jointly, showing that the mixing can theoretically be undone using function approximators such as deep neural networks. In contrast to known identifiability results for nonlinear ICA, we prove that independent latent sources with arbitrary mixing can be recovered as long as multiple, sufficiently different noisy views are available.